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15 Americans Edited by Dorothy C 15 Americans Edited by Dorothy C. Miller, with statements by the artists and others Author Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) Date 1952 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by Simon & Schuster Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3294 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK 5 x AMERICANS LIBRARY Museumof ModernArt ARCHIVE KEASERE TURNTOT HEO FFICEOF MONROE WHEELER 5 ! AMERICANS . BAZIOTES CORBETT DICKINSON FERBER GLASCO PAGES 12-14 6-7 42-44 10-1 1 33-35 KATZMAN KIESLER KRIESBERG LIPPOLD POLLOCK 38-39 8-9 36-37 7-29 2 15-17 ROSE ROTHKO STILL TOMLIN WILFRED 40-41 18-20 21-23 24-26 30-32 EDITED BY DOROTHY C. MILLER WITH STATEMENTS BY THE ARTISTS AND OTHERS 5 J AMERICANS THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK ACKNOWLEDGMENTS On behalf of the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Lily van Ameringen. I also wish to thank Witten- Art, I wish to express my gratitude to the artists for born, Schultz, Inc. for permission to quote the help in assembling their work for this exhibition statement by William Baziotes published in Possi and for contributing statements for the catalog; to bilities 1 (Problems of Contemporary Art, No. 4), the collectors, museums and dealers whose gener winter 1947-48; Ruth and John Stephan for per osity in lending has made the exhibition possible mission to quote two statements by Mark Rothko and whose names appear on page 45. Grateful published in The Tiger's Eye, December 1947, and acknowledgment is made to Mr. Alfonso Ossorio October 1949; the American Society for Aesthetics and to Mr. Edward W. Root for their statements and Dr. Thomas Munro for permission to quote on Pollock and Tomlin; to Mr. Charles C. Cun from articles by Thomas Wilfred published in 1'he ningham, Mr. Charles Egan, Mr. Henry Elkan, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, June 1947 and Dr. Max Gruenewald, Mr. Robert Beverly Hale, December 1948; Harper's Bazaar for the photograph Mr. Donald W. Laging, Mr. Frederick B. Robin of Frederick Kiesler's sculpture. son, Mr. Ben Rose, Mr. William B. H. Sawyer, DOROTHY C. MILLER Mr. Clay Spohn, Mr. Joseph S. Trovato and Miss Director of the Exhibition TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART JOHN HAY WHITNEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD; S. PALEY, MRS. E. B. PARKINSON, MRS. CHARLES S. HENRY ALLEN MOE, 1ST VICE-CHAIRMAN; PHILIP L. PAYSON, ANDREW CARNDUFF RITCHIE, DAVID ROCKE GOODWIN, 2ND VICE-CHAIRMAN; NELSON A. ROCKE FELLER, BEARDSLEY RUML, JOHN L. SENIOR, JR., FELLER, president; mrs. david m. levy, ist vice- JAMES THRALL SOBY, EDWARD M. M. WARBURG, president; ALFRED H. BARR, JR., MRS. ROBERT WOODS MONROE WHEELER BLISS, WILLIAM A. M. BURDEN, STEPHEN C. CLARK, RENE D'HARNONCOURT, MRS. EDSEL B. FORD, A. HONORARY TRUSTEES CONGER GOODYEAR, MRS. SIMON GUGGENHEIM, FREDERIC CLAY BARTLETT, MRS. W. MURRAY CRANE, WALLACE K. HARRISON, JAMES W. HUSTED, MRS. DUNCAN PHILLIPS, PAUL J. SACHS, MRS. JOHN S. ALBERT D. LASKER, MRS. HENRY R. LUCE, RANALD H. SHEPPARD MACDONALD, MRS. G. MACCULLOCH MILLER, WILLIAM Copyright ig$2 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Printed in the United States of America FOREWORD Fifteen Americans is one of a series of exhibitions initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, the year of its founding. Like the others in the series this exhibition follows a pattern devised at that time: to present the work of a limited number of artists, devoting considerable space, in some instances a whole gallery, to the work of each one. In contrast with the cross-sections of contemporary American art held annually by many museums in which a large number of artists are represented by one work each, this pattern has been found to give a broader and more effective view of individual achievement. The series began in 1929 with Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans and continued in 1930 with Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans. After a num ber of more general American exhibitions held during the 1930s, the Museum presented Americans 1942, which showed eighteen artists then working outside New York. American Realists and Magic Realists, 1943, was the only exhibition of the series devoted to a specific kind of painting; while Fourteen Americans, 1946, reviewed the work of artists of diverse styles, as had the earlier shows. Fifteen Americans, 1952, again brings together a group of distinguished artists of marked individuality and widely differing aims. Their achievement may indicate trends in our art today, but to discover and illustrate such trends was not the primary intention behind the exhibition. The purpose was rather to give each artist an opportunity to speak to the Museum's public, in clear and individual terms, through a strong presentation of his work. American art is rich in diversity. It is rich too in the mastery of techniques, a mastery which frees the artist for his main effort, the creation of form and symbol to express the quality and dimension of his experience. In the work of certain artists in Fifteen Americans—Dickinson, Rose, Katzman —experience and its expression are related to the world the artist sees about him. Others — Baziotes, Kiesler, Ferber, and Pollock in some of his latest pictures —even when dealing primarily with abstract forms, evoke vivid associations with the objective world. The work of Glasco and of Kriesberg seems to fall between these two groups. Rothko, Still, much of Pollock, Tomlin, Corbett, Lippold and Wilfred fall within the category usually called abstract, which, as many competent observers have remarked, is the dominant trend in mid- century American painting. Classification of this kind is apt to be inaccurate. If it does not mislead the public it usually annoys the artist, particularly since so many of its terms can scarcely be defined. To this show of the work of fifteen painters and sculptors, separately exhibited, the artists' own statements, thoughtful, evocative, poetic, will prove the best introduction. D. C. M. 5 EDWARD CORBETT opposite: Edward Corbett: Number u. 1951. Chalk, 34^8 x 22 . La Galeria Escondida, Taos, New Mexico left: Edward Corbett: Number 13. 195 1. Chalk and casein, 27 x 14". La Galeria Escondida, Taos, New Mexico Born Chicago, 1919. Son of Army officer; as a child, lived in Washington, D.C.; at Army posts in San Antonio and Laredo, Texas; the Philippines; Ohio; Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Went to high school at Tombstone, Arizona, and Richmond, California. Studied at California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1938-40. U.S. Army, 1941 ; Merchant Marine, 1942-44. In New York, 1944-46. To San Francisco, 1946. Taught at San Francisco State College, 1947, California School of Fine Arts, 1947- 51, and University of California, 1950. Returned to the Southwest, 1951; now lives in Taos, New Mexico. In group exhibitions: San Francisco mu seums. from 1947; American Abstract Artists, New York, 1947; Art Institute of Chicago, 1947; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 1950. magm mm. I intend my work as poetry. EDWARD CORBETT 7 CORBETT FREDERICK KIESLER Note on Correalism: consciousness would manifest itself in every type of life-activity and so, naturally, in painting, sculpting, My sculpture is a practical sculpture. It is both to building. be lived with and within. I find my paintings consisting of many paintings, Sculpture should be touched not by the eye alone. smaller and larger units, separated from each other It should be enjoyed not only esthetically but through intervals of varying dimensions, yet be physically as well. This is a sculpture for relaxation. longing together as one cluster, one nova, one galaxy. My sculptures I also see as consisting of It has always been difficult for me to separate arti divergent chunks of matter, held together yet apart, facts from facts. Sculpture, painting, architecture appearing like galactic structures, * each part lead should not be used as wedges to split our experience ing a life of coexistence, of correality with the of art and life; they are here to link, to correlate, to others. Yet this correlation, whether close or far bind dream and reality. To separate sculpture and apart, does not necessarily depend on physical links. painting from the flow of our daily environment is As in wireless electricity, there is correlation with to put them on pedestals, to shut them up in frames, out connection. These "endless" paintings and thus destroying their integrative potentialities and sculptures lead a life of inner cohesion. Between arresting their continuity with our total mode of these corporeal units there lie the various empty life. fields of tension that hold the parts together like planets in a void. The debacle of art as a necessity today is caused by its separation from daily living, its isolation. During FREDERICK KIESLER the past fifty years it has exhibited the exciting flare-up of a flame before extinction. The new flame *It was some time ago that I first worked on the will be kindled by the reawakening of our primor structural principle of "tensions in free space" and dial awareness of the interrelatedness of man and wrote about it in the review De Stijl, Paris, 1925. nature, by a new consciousness of belonging- The term correalism in its relation to nuclear con together, of coexistence in spite of apartness in cepts appeared first in my paper on the Laboratory space-time, of interdependence beyond such eco for Design Correlation at Columbia University in nomic and social factors as now separate us.
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